In Starbound, you take on the role of a character who’s just fled from their home planet, only to crash-land on another. From there you’ll embark on a quest to survive, discover, explore and fight your way across an infinite universe!

Sign in to add this item to your wishlist, follow it, or mark it as not interested

Early Access Game

Get instant access and start playing; get involved with this game as it develops.

Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you
should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“We were at a point in Starbound's development where it was already pretty fun, so we decided to release the game in beta through early access to ensure the community has a chance to help us shape the game.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“It's difficult for us to give a solid release date-- we're not so good at those, we've learned. Starbound still has a ways to go, but we'll keep you posted via our website!”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“The full version of Starbound will contain a plot and sidequests, more dungeons, more bosses and lore, among other features.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Starbound is already extremely playable and contains a vast amount of content in its current state! There are two beta branches currently in use-- [STABLE] and [NIGHTLY].

The stable branch receives less frequent updates, as we're currently working on one big update that will complete the first few tiers of player progression.

The [NIGHTLY] branch is updated automatically every night, and is for players who want to track progress or simply can't wait to check out shiny new features. :D Play at your own risk, though, as these builds are not tested and bugs/crashes are likely.

Recommended By Curators

February 17

These changes have now been pushed to the stable branch, along with a few other small fixes. Enjoy!

It’s been a busy week and a half since our last bugfix update. While the artists have been forging ahead on content for the next major patch, we programmers have been going through lots of user feedback, stomping out bugs, and cleaning up a few annoying problems that have been on the To Do list for too long.

Crafting and inventory windows can be closed by pressing the key or activating the object that opened them

Crafting (and other interfaces) close when you are no longer near the object

Interacting with objects now requires the player have line of sight to them.

This means that you cannot sit in chairs, flip switches, or use crafting stations through walls.

February 12

It’s been a busy week and a half since our last bugfix update. While the artists have been forging ahead on content for the next major patch, we programmers have been going through lots of user feedback, stomping out bugs, and cleaning up a few annoying problems that have been on the To Do list for too long. These are the changes we’re pushing to the Unstable branch, which should hit stable after a few days of testing to make sure nothing breaks.

Crafting and inventory windows can be closed by pressing the key or activating the object that opened them

Crafting (and other interfaces) close when you are no longer near the object

Interacting with objects now requires the player have line of sight to them.

This means that you cannot sit in chairs, flip switches, or use crafting stations through walls.

Reviews

“Starbound is one of the most impressive never-ending games I've ever played.”
9 – Polygon

“Starbound's delivering on its core promises even in its early access incarnation.”
Eurogamer

“This might be a bare-bones version of the game to come, but boy, check out those bones. The game's minutiae will be mapped out across various wikis for years to come, and many mechanics will be added and refined, but even now, Starbound is an enticing journey of discovery that reminds you just how exciting it can be to stare at a sky full of stars.”
Gamespot

Huge winter update!

The huge winter update is here!

After many months of work the winter update has finally been released. It contains more changes than we can list but below are some of the most obvious updates.

***Universe and Worlds***

Sectors have been removed, so all stars are part of the same map

Star and planet types correspond to difficulty levels, giving players access to progressively more extreme environments as they advance through the game

Added oceanic world types including tropical and arctic oceans, toxic and magma planets

Added rare Barren and Asteroid worlds with no monsters for large scale building

New biomes

New surface and underground mini biomes

Many changes to surface and underground terrain generation

Improvements to background parallaxes and sky coloration

***Ships and Navigation***

Player ships now include an AI avatar specific to each race that gives access to the player’s techs, missions, 3D printer, and a variety of ship-related commands

Each race’s ship has its own unique set of upgrades, giving players much more room to expand as they progress

Fuel costs for travel have been reworked. Moving between planets within a system is now free, while jumps to other systems require fuel in proportion to the distance traveled.

Coal no longer powers spaceships! Instead, they can use either radioactive ores or the new Liquid Erchius Fuel that now appears in Moon biomes

Many improvements to the Cockpit interface, which now indicates more detailed planet information including weather and environmental hazards

***Outpost***

The universe now has a civilized hub containing shops, quests, and other services. This is where players will find quests, missions, and ship upgrades which allow them to advance through the game

Includes a Sign Store based on the popular custom signs mod, where players can design and print their own signage for use in game

***Missions***

At key points in the progression, players will unlock special Missions

Missions take place in unique instanced dungeons containing special monsters, bosses, and rewards not available anywhere else

Some missions can be quite difficult, so you’ll want to prepare carefully - or bring friends!

***Novakids***

New playable race!

Unique progression of craftable guns

Unique progression of armor sets

Unique progression of ship upgrades

***Tech***

Techs are now split into head, body, legs and suit slots, so you can equip up to four at once!

Head techs provide various activated effects triggered using the tech hotkeys

About This Game

In Starbound, you take on the role of a character who’s just fled from their home planet, only to crash-land on another. From there you’ll embark on a quest to survive, discover, explore and fight your way across an infinite universe.

You’ll encounter procedurally generated creatures and weapons, discover populated villages and abandoned temples. Explore planets dotted with dungeons, eyeball trees and treasure. Make use of over a hundred materials and over one thousand in-game objects to build a sprawling modern metropolis or a sleepy secluded cabin in the woods, and do all of it alone or with friends!

Starbound lets you live out your own story of space exploration, discovery and adventure. Settle down and farm the land, hop from planet to planet claiming resources, or make regular visits to populated settlements, taking on jobs and earning a living. NPCs are scattered about the worlds, offering quests and challenges for those looking for a little extra excitement in their lives.

Despite still being in Early Access, Starbound is my favorite game in sandbox exploration/building genre.

In comparison with Terraria (which I expect most people at least heard of), Starbound puts much stronger focus on exploration rather than fighting. Rather than adventuring in a single world, in Starbound you travel between different planets each not only belonging to a particular biome, but containing some of unique features from a fairly large list, from peaceful villages to dungeons filled with zealous guards. So you never know what you will find on each new planet you visit, which makes exploration very addictive: you will always want to explore “just one more planet”!

In terms of combat and other game mechanics, Starbound already has pretty solid core mechanics at this point of development, though they keep being tweaked and some core mechanics may still change in the future.

In short, I fully recommend Starbound to anyone who likes sandbox games or want to give this genre a try. And don’t be put off by it being in Early Access – Starbound is already perfectly playable and fun at this point of development.

Starbound is a game that reminds me of Terraria. [Reminds most of us].I'm not a big fan of Terraria, so I'm not a big fan of Starbound either. The graphics are nice, the worlds are great, there is alot of Monsters that you can find on your way to the objective. You can choose a race you can play, her/his body and more options. This is very fun if you like Terraria, but since I'm not a big fan of pixely-like games, I wasn't really enjoying much.

If you have a choice to buy this game or not, buy it. But if you don't like Terraria or Minecraft, don't buy this :o

For any of you fans of Terraria who thought that being restricted to just one world was not enough, Starbound will be your personal wet dream. For a beta it is surprisingly feature complete, I've already played over 200 hours and gotten my fair $15 worth of enjoyment out of it. The fact that they still plan to keep adding content is just icing on the cake. My one piece of advice? Try to be patient, the updates come on long intervals and the devs like to promise a lot. Given the recent controversy over Godus and early access in general, it's a good idea to avoid the hype train and enjoy this game for what it is now. Sure, the promises made by the devs sound amazing, but my own personal policy for how to judge a game is to ask "Is it worth its current asking price in the current state it's in right this moment?" Some games fail this litmus test, but Starbound definitely passes with flying colors. If you like creative building games, you'll love this.

I would have to agree from the bottom and top of my heart that if you have an excessive amount of creativity, this game is for you. Regardless of the state of your creativity, this game is intelligent and well worked on. It made me think of our solar system and beyond. Totally worth it's price.

Starbound has an educational side, too. I'd let my kids play this when they're older so they can get associated with geogrophy. 10/10

There have been alot of hype for this game without any real advertising. Tiy left re-digit (the creators of terraria) to start his own project and many people were curious about what is to come. It didn't take too long for them to reveal their project to the world with first screenshots of the human race and a yellow mech. It was clear that this game is going to be a 2D Sandbox game and that it's going to be futuristic.We've had to wait a long time to finally get our hands on the first public build, their little kickstarter was a huge success. I don't think they ever imagined to raise this much money. For a small studio this must have ment so much but it also brought alot of pressure. That much people interested in this game!

After a few updates it was pretty quiet, nothing was happening in the universe of Starbound and many started rioting, bashing chucklefish left and right... But nobody could say that they are not working on the game, nightly updates were released often. That was enough for people like me to not lose hope in this game. Besides, if they would abandon this project after a success like that, it would haunt them forever. They wouldn't be able to get any other game out, because people would just not trust them anymore.

And here we are, another huge stable update have hit the game and it almost feels like it's a completly new game. The previous stable build looks like a mechanical demo compared to this.Questing system have been properly implemented and it's really fun! I always wanted something like this to be present in terraria. The only mod that brought some questing never really got anywhere with it, but starbound really delivered and the direction this game is going towards is much clearer now.But don't worry, the endless space is still here, the fact that you will never be able to explore every single planet in this game is still true! The only thing that changed is that you are not going to be able to travel through space right away. At first you are stuck within your solar system, before you will be able to repair your FTL drive.

Ship upgrades are finally here, they are linear, you are not able to build your ship as you want, but of course you can decorate the interior as you want, that is still here! The final stage of your ship is huge! You'll have space for anything you need. Create a pool with healing water? Sure why not! Storage room will have enough room for any garbage you think is worth keeping around. With the new paint tool you can also paint your back walls to hot pink if you are into that kind of stuff, but of course any other color is available to you!

Alot of stuff happened to planets as well, your ship now tells you alot more about each individual planet. Is there breathable atmosphere? What kind of weather conditions can I expect? Is it dangerous down there? The cave system have been reworked to give it more "natural" sense. And thank god you don't have to dig for hours to stumble upon one, they are quite frequent. New landmarks have also been added, new "mini-dungeons" are simply here to keep the underground a bit more interesting and often hide tressure! And of course villages and various facilities/prisons/towers and what not are still on the surface for you to find.

Battle system have changed a bit too. Spears have 360 degrees aim function now for example. Shields have been also reworked but as I am using 2H sword almost all the time, I can't talk about that much. Enemies are still randomly generated and there's "big monster generator" in the works, I can't wait for that! With proper mini-bosses the game is going to be that much more interesting.

Thousands and thousands of items! Yep, still here! All the things you can use for building, all the cosmetic items your character can wear. The ammount of iutems in this game is absurdly high but somehow it doesn't feel like the devs were thinking "quantity over quality", it works! And the main reason for that is that the game is just huge, you are not stuck in one world, there's so many of them that the ammoun of items fits right in and there's still room for more and there will be more. As far as weapons go, they follow the "Borderlands" formula as in all of them are randomly generated. Except a few of them like the ones you can craft, these are not going to change. And of course unique weapons like the tesla gun, these are not going to have different stats each time you find one. But those you find randomly in treasure chests and as drops from your enemies, they will always be different.

Moding community is also really active so you can explore some additional content like this too.

All in all, this game is still very much in development but it's shaping up nicely! If you like sandbox games, I don't think you can go wrong with this one. You'll get many hours of enjoyement out of it and you can look forward to many updates to come. But as we learned, don't expect stable updates too often. You can always switch to "nightly" or "unstable" to get the most recent changes right away, but especially with nightly, expect the game to be.. well broken. It is here for everyone that wants to see this game's every change right away, but there are things that will be buggy, the game might crash alot etc etc. You know what I mean.So get the game and go out there! The space is waiting for you. The game is worth getting even in this early access stage.

Oh my god an early access game that's finished enough to play? Incredible. Even in an early beta stage this game blew me away with its vastness. Starbound is worth the money now, and will be WELL worth it once it's expanded upon in future updates. Solid combat system (can still use some work), amazing exploration, and with still so much to offer this game is a 9/10 any day.

Following the first update in over a year, this game is finally worth the money they're charging for it. Is that a good thing, or a markerlight for the current state of the game's industry? I don't know, I've been too busy playing Starbound to think about it.

I can't recommend this game highly enough. It is solid, cute and well written. The cooperative play aspects are well done, and the challenge level makes it enjoyable without being frustrating for a wide skill set of gamers.

While it's fair to say that it's an evolution of games like Terraria, it is a huge one. The concepts of building and exploring in other games are taken an enormous step further with Starbound.

One of the principal mechanics of the game is your personal space ship, which you build into a mobile base. This ship remains with you even when you go to other servers, or play in your single player game - providing consistency and backdrop for your other adventures.

There is a great deal of cosmetic design you are able to do in ships and planetside base building, lots of varied and interesting enemies, mining, crafting and wire-based logic design. It really is quite an interesting game.

I'm a gaming dad, and this is one of the games that I've played with my kids. If you're a gaming dad, wait until it's on sale and get a 4-pack and gift it around. It really is a great experience to let your kids see that side of you, and to guide and grow with them in games as a virtual peer.

This game is easily the best pixelated game i've seen. If you like terraria, minecraft, edge of space, or any indie-based survival game, i would easily reccomend this to you. Beautiful graphics, animations, music, and plot. This game shows an amazing story, from the Echirus Mining Facility boss fight to making a civillian coffee because he cannot simply afford it. This game's pros: Great graphics, music, animations, plot, setting, action, and can make a moment very eerie with only its' music. This game's cons: Lots of bugs, servers can be very glitchy. ||| But overall, for it's type of game, this made me addicted in minutes of gameplay. ||| Rate: 10/10. Ive never rated a game this before.

As this game is still in development, I will most likely write another review in the future. With that said, if you enjoy sandbox adventure games with resource gathering and crafting, Starbound is worth a go, particularly if you can catch it on sale.

I've played a fair bit of Minecraft, and have also tried Terraria, both of which are easy to compare to, particularly the latter. What sets this game apart? That is difficult to define, but it certainly has its own charm. Especially with the Upbeat Giraffe update, which added a lot to the mythos and overall structure of the game. It also has a great mix of fantasy and scifi themes, which sit well with me.

In terms of gameplay, it is easy to learn, family-friendly, and allows for a fair bit of replayability. Combat can be a challenge, and finding/building decent weapons and armour will take some time, but with infinite lives, and nigh on infinite worlds to discover, you'll find yourself coming back again and again.

Graphically, this game is only for those that enjoy a lo-fi indie experience, but again, with recent updates there is a level of sophistication that I appreciate. It is also very consistent in appearance, and remarkable in the procedurally generated creatures and planets.

As always, I have the music turned off, but the ambient sound of the game adds a lot, changing depending upon the planet, and even the depth to which you go mining. There is a repetitive nature to it, of course, but the quality is there in the sound production.

Overall, this is a great action indie game for people that like mining and crafting, with a sense of adventure that I don't always get from Minecraft. And while it is still in Beta, the changes I've seen show a dedicated developer, and leaves me eager to see what the final product will be like.

Ain't it fun when you can buy a game on steam for cheap, even cheaper when on sale, and easily squeeze 60 to 100 hours of fun out of it? That sums my experience with Starbound up, first on unstable and then on stable. Had next to no crashes or bugs except during the couple of days when they pushed a lot of fixes out on stable and even then nothing I wouldn't expect from a beta. That chest size reduction patch had me run all over my ship to collect my stuff from the floor tho..and quick, before it disappears!

Here's my quick review:

Pros:-Affordable, most full priced games won't even last 20 hours while this one gives 3 times more for 1/3 of the price-Fun as there's a lot of contents, it never felt like a chore to play and there's a ton of vanity items to collect-Best "building" experience so far on a 2d sandbox in my opinion, can build fast and with ease -Loved the art (those alien trees!) and characters design-Quirky humour, clearly a beststabber's work -Floranssss-Extensive tutorials, and a decent wiki to help the player out-Good, responsive controls both when battling/exploring and when building-Multiplayer is easy to set up and best enjoyed with friends-There's a number of helpful videos on yt, and some of them gamers (like KMo/Starbrethren) have pleasant, not obnoxious voices for a change!

Cons:-Multiplayer is often laggy even with pretty decent connections-Some framerate drops, usually when there's a high number of npcs on the planet -Sword and shield is the way! Guns are pretty much just for fun, ranged system needs a revamp-Some boss battles from the precedent version were removed, I hope they will put em back to beef the story up a bit-Pets, mounts and vehicles (minus the boat and mech summons) not in game yet-First playthrough requires the wiki unless one has unlimited time to play and can afford to wander till he chances upon the duck/emblem/map quest items - this is true for most sandbox crafting games to be honest

The cons didn't actually detract much from the hours of fun I enjoyed while playing Starbound so I feel like recommending the game even at this stage. Unlike some other 2d sandbox games I didn't feel like the game was hating on me and trying to prevent me from having fun by spawning horrific hell pits five squares from my house or something, and the progression was quite fair to me even when some monsters and boss battles presented a challenge. All in all there's fun to be had!